It is possible for a failing hard drive to produce file corruption.  When
you say that the drive was wiped before reloading windows, did you use the
hard drive manufacturer's utility for doing this?  I believe that some of
these will check for bad sectors as they go and take them out of service
(perhaps even bringing new sectors online, if there was some unused slack in
the drive).  In any case, it would be a good idea to run a thorough disk
scan, using the hard drive manufacturer's utility before you reinstall your
operating system on that drive again.  (Zeroing out the drive, using the
manufacturer's utility, should overwrite any virus that might have been on
the drive previously.)

It might also be a good idea to try and rule out a couple of other sources
of data corruption before you do this.  You can download and run either
MemTest86 or Microsoft's Memory Testing Utility in order to make sure that
your RAM is working properly (let these tests run for several hours, not
just one pass, unless they are already finding a problem).  You might also
want to make sure that your processor isn't getting flakey.  The number
crunching distributed client for the Prime95 project is commonly used for
this.  Run the torture test for several hours to make sure that your system
isn't misfiring.  (I advise making sure that your fans are working and the
CPU heatsink is not clogged with dust before running Prime95 because it will
heat up your processor through heavy usage.)

A failing hard drive controller on the motherboard can also cause data
corruption.  I don't know of a good test for checking this other than
copying and moving a very large file (several hundred MBs) from one location
to another on your harddrive.  You can use the ability of compression
programs, like WinZip, to produce a CRC number for the file to make sure
that it isn't being corrupted after you've moved it around several times
(i.e., when you zip the file you should get the same CRC number after its
been moved a few times as you did before hand; many compression programs
test the integrity of the contents of a zipped file, so you can use this
feature after moving a zipped archive around, too).

I hope some of these ideas are helpful.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gordon Totty" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 12:41 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] System File Corruption


> This is sort of a theoretical question.  System files on a computer are
> repeatedly getting corrupted in spite of extra care with virus detection,
> reloading from clean sources, etc.  The HDD has been wiped and reloaded,
> but the problem returns rather quickly.  Two questions:
>
> Is it possible for a virus to exist in the normally inaccessible HDD
> manufacturer's space on the HDD?
>
> Is it possible for failing HDD to produce these symptoms?

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